Apple News is being urged to remove articles by a Palestinian-born commentator which include claims that the Bondi Beach terror attack was “false flag” orchestrated by Mossad and the Hamas commanders behind October 7 are “martyrs”.
Palestinian-born Abdel Bari Atwan, who is based in London, has appeared on the BBC, Al Jazeera and Sky.
In one piece available on Apple News, Atwan writes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government “are most responsible for every drop of Jewish blood shed and for the growing hatred against Jews in the world”.
A leading media monitoring group said it was Apple's “responsibility to exercise basic quality control over the news content it curates”.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism called for Apple to “urgently” stop using the material.
Atwan’s extreme rhetoric has been criticised for many years.
The JC has previously exposed the 76-year-old for praising terrorists who murdered Israeli civilians as “martyrs” and describing a Palestinian gunman’s attack in Tel Aviv as a “miracle”.
He also defended the 1972 Munich massacre of the Israeli Olympic team, expressed sympathy with the views of the man who stabbed Salman Rushdie, and said that if Iran attacked Israel, he would dance in Trafalgar Square.
The former editor of Al Quds Al Arabi has appeared on Dateline London on BBC World, Al Jazeera English and Sky News, as well as America’s CNN.
In 2022, 36 Jewish leaders, politicians and public figures wrote to the then Director General of the BBC Tim Davie demanding the corporation stop using him as a regular contributor.
The Dateline London programme was shelved by the BBC.
Despite the well-documented controversy over Atwan’s views, Apple News has repeatedly published his content.
Some articles appear exclusively on Apple News, while others appear to be translations from Atwan’s own website, Raialyoum.
Some of his most shocking comments came just hours after the Bondi Beach attack, during which 12 people were gunned down.
He wrote: “This bloody attack, which targeted well over two thousand people celebrating the Jewish holiday ‘Hanukkah’ on one of the beaches of the Australian capital, Sydney, this morning and resulted in the death of 12 people, is likely to be a premeditated Israeli act as part of a new, calculated strategy aimed at attempting to ‘repair’ Israel's image as a ‘victim’ and reviving the myth of ‘anti-Semitism’ that has completely eroded due to the genocide in the Gaza Strip.”
He added: “The myth of ‘anti-Semitism’ was specifically used to extort the Western world, taking hundreds of billions of dollars from its people's wealth by monopolising false narratives of ‘victimhood’ and ‘oppression’ while exaggerating the Holocaust.”
More recently, on June 7, following Iranian strikes on Kuwait and Bahrain, an Atwan article appeared on Apple News with both his website’s branding and the Apple News logo claiming: “America's true battle is to liberate itself from Israeli hegemony, which no longer threatens it security-wise or militarily and which only destroys its global prestige as a superpower, as well as causes it to lose the entire Middle East, its wealth, and its global strategic position since WWII.”
On May 17 he wrote: “The city of Gaza [...] mourned martyr leader Izz al-Din al-Haddad today, who is described as one of the most prominent masterminds and executors of the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ operation [...]. Most significantly, all participants in this ‘raid’ returned to their bases safely, carrying their ‘booty’ of detainees to their secure tunnels.”
In October last year under a headline reading, “Yes.. People who massacre children and women in Gaza are not chosen by God”, he claimed that the Manchester synagogue attack that month was to be “expected”.
Apple has pledged that its platforms would not be a “home for hate” when then CEO Tim Cook accepted the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) inaugural ‘Courage Against Hate’ award in 2018.
A spokesman for media monitoring group CAMERA told the JC: "Abdel Bari Atwan's bigotry contaminates the credibility of every platform that publishes his columns — including English-language translations appearing under Apple's branding.
"It is Apple's responsibility to exercise basic quality control over the news content it curates. This is particularly true in light of the commitments articulated by its own CEO in 2018, namely "not to be bystanders as hate tries to make its headquarters in the digital world".
The Campaign Against Antisemitism called on Apple to stop using material by Atwan.
A spokesman said: “Established sites like Apple News, which are a prestigious brand with a huge and captive readership, have no business presenting articles like these.
“Apple News must maintain the trust of its users and urgently stop displaying articles from Ralalyoum.
“Everyone has a responsibility to stand up against the worst surge in global antisemitism in living memory and that includes major corporates like Apple.”
Atwan and Apple were approached for a response.
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